Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 04:09:32AM -0700, "John W. Krahn" <krahnj at telus.net> wrote:
>>>Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
>>>>>They are just there for reasons of precedence. Parens really really
>>>really truly don't function as list constructors.
>>>>So in the expressions:
>>>>while ( () ) { print "this won't print\n" }
>>>>$count = () = $string =~ /\d+/g;
>>>>You are saying that there is no list?
>> :) For every rule, there's an exception; () is the exception here.
>> But it doesn't work by way of some grammatical rule that what's inside
> () is a list; empty parens are handled in perl's grammar as a special
> case. I guess you could look at it as the parentheses being required
> to delimit the empty list for which there is no other syntactic
> provision.
I concur. :-)
Yet I could argue that, in the second example, if the parentheses did delimit
an empty list then $count would always contain 0.
;-}
John
--
use Perl;
program
fulfillment